Just days after recovering from a life-threatening seizure and coma, alternative history researcher Graham Hancock put out a call to crowdsource research for a forthcoming book. Hancock asked his fans to help him research the question of whether wooly mammoths faced a catastrophic extinction event in Alaska at the end of the Ice Age. Hancock is particularly interested in the work of Frank Hibben and Froelich Rainey from the 1930s and 1940s, and the articles that he cites sounded familiar to me. It turns out there was a good reason for that. The sources Hancock uses are the same ones that creationists have spent the better part of half a century using to allege that the mammoths were “flash frozen” by a catastrophic change in temperature. I explored those claims last year (here and here), but Hancock has now offered a slightly more sophisticated version of the earlier claim in defense of his current hobbyhorse, that a comet slammed into the Earth at the end of the Younger Dryas, destroying Atlantis.

Hancock has long been interested in flash-frozen mammoths. The story appears in Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), where Hancock first used it as evidence of a sudden and catastrophic “pole shift” that froze the mammoths in the space of an hour or two as the entire Earth’s crust slipped over the planet’s surface.

The story of the flash-frozen mammoths goes back a long way, before it was even a part of creationist and fringe history lore. It began with jokes about Alaskan restaurants serving mammoth steaks, derived, ultimately, from a Russian account of what happened when the Berskova mammoth was unearthed in Siberia in 1901. As a 1929 investigation showed, the flesh at first seemed fresh, but after thawing smelled so bad that only the sled dogs would eat it. The only scientist to try the meat immediately became violently ill. Nevertheless, anti-imperial propagandists painted a portrait of the Tsar himself dining on mammoth steaks and prehistoric grains in a decadent feast of extinct foods. ...

According to this article, mammoths were on Wrangel Island in the Russian Arctic 4,300 years ago.

The island separated from the Russian mainland about 12,000 years ago by rising sea levels, taking a group of mammoths along with it. But by that time, according to the fossil record, mammoth populations were already starting to die off.

“We don’t know why,” Love Dalen, the senior author of the report and an associate professor of biology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, told Nicholas Bakalar for the New York Times. “Human hunting, changes in the environment, warming of the temperatures. But it happens everywhere — that’s for sure — and at the same time.”

By comparing DNA taken from a 4,300 year-old mammoth tooth found on Wrangel Island with that of a 45,000 year-old soft tissue sample found in northern Siberia, the researchers discovered that there had been two massive die-offs before the last mammoths went extinct. Wooly mammoths had already survived a massive die-off about 300,000 years ago; it took the species around 100,000 years to recover. After the second die-off, about 12,000 years ago, the survivors numbered in the hundreds, according to Reuters. The Wrangel Island mammoths likely survived for about 6,000 years after the mainland mammoths died out. Dalen’s group also found that the Wrangel Island mammoth population’s isolation was severely inbred, which likely contributed to their extinction.

I bought his 'Flooded Kingdoms' book and found that well researched and compelling. Much of his other theories are far too deeply buried in pseudo- science.
Given the evidence for mammoths having survived (albeit at the cost of reduced size) until possibly the 2nd millennium BC, this theory sounds like a non-starter.

Researchers who have sexed 98 woolly mammoth specimens collected from various parts of Siberia have discovered that the fossilized remains more often came from males of the species than females. They speculate that this skewed sex ratio -- seven out of every ten specimens examined belonged to males -- exists in the fossil record because inexperienced male mammoths more often travelled alone and got themselves killed by falling into natural traps that made their preservation more likely.

"Most bones, tusks, and teeth from mammoths and other Ice Age animals haven't survived," said Love Dalen of the Swedish Museum of Natural History. "It is highly likely that the remains that are found in Siberia these days have been preserved because they have been buried, and thus protected from weathering. The new findings imply that male mammoths more often died in a way that meant their remains were buried, perhaps by falling through lake ice in winter or getting stuck in bogs."

"We were very surprised because there was no reason to expect a sex bias in the fossil record," added Patrícia Pecnerova, the study's first author, also at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. "Since the ratio of females to males was likely balanced at birth, we had to consider explanations that involved better preservation of male remains."

Researchers who have sexed 98 woolly mammoth specimens collected from various parts of Siberia have discovered that the fossilized remains more often came from males of the species than females. They speculate that this skewed sex ratio -- seven out of every ten specimens examined belonged to males -- exists in the fossil record because inexperienced male mammoths more often travelled alone and got themselves killed by falling into natural traps that made their preservation more likely.

"Most bones, tusks, and teeth from mammoths and other Ice Age animals haven't survived," said Love Dalen of the Swedish Museum of Natural History. "It is highly likely that the remains that are found in Siberia these days have been preserved because they have been buried, and thus protected from weathering. The new findings imply that male mammoths more often died in a way that meant their remains were buried, perhaps by falling through lake ice in winter or getting stuck in bogs."

"We were very surprised because there was no reason to expect a sex bias in the fossil record," added Patrícia Pecnerova, the study's first author, also at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. "Since the ratio of females to males was likely balanced at birth, we had to consider explanations that involved better preservation of male remains."

More than a century ago, every educated person understood that the bones of giants were actually the remains of fossilized elephant species, including the woolly mammoth, the mastodon, the dwarf elephant, and their various cousins. This information was readily available in most books of natural history, and even churchmen, who considered giants to be an article of faith, felt the need to acknowledge the obviousness of the fact before trying to argue why theirparticular giant was the exception to the general rule. Yet after the Second World War, this connection between fossils evidence and mythological fantasy no longer seemed obvious, and when Adrienne Mayor reintroduced it around 2000, the suggestion that fossils had a relationship to mythology was greeted as fresh and new.

One of the questions I have thought quite a bit about is how a well-established theory about the origin of giant claims could fall into such disrepair. We are today living with the consequences of that retrenchment. Among the creationists and the gigantologists and the Nephilim theorists of today, for example, there is a widespread if false belief that no mammoth bones have ever been documented in modern times to have been mistaken for those of a humanoid giant. This is a strange claim, considering the repeated and documented proof that men of science and ignorant bumpkins alike have mistaken the large bones of elephants for those of human giants.

In his new book Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science (Pegasus, 2017), John J. McKay relates the history of humanity’s efforts to understand the remains of the mammoth and its proboscidean cousins in a clear and compelling narrative about the very human effort to explain the seemingly inexplicable. I regret that it has taken me longer than I would have liked to get to reading and reviewing the book, which came out during the summer. Sometimes, time slips away from me! The book itself, McKay writes, grew out of his interest in the outré and the bizarre: ...